Snipcart's shopping cart is a perfect tool if you are looking to build your e-store with Edicy product catalogue. And to make it even better, Snipcart's team took their time to really work it through and share their Edicy experience with others.

The simplicity of Edicy does not only rely on the everyday usability, but also on the fact that we are offering a one-stop-shop for running a site – hosting, content and domain management, code editor with a knowledge base for more technical people, as well as a super friendly helpdesk.

And we've been rewarded a thousand times for our work – each day sees more and more tailor-made sites built on Edicy, pleasing on the eye, helping people in their daily life while offering and finding different services.

omaasi.com / youroffice.ee – these two sites created by Velvet Digital Paper have been out there for more than a year. Both of them use a similar one page layout onto which a blog and product list has been built using our catalogue tool. Both of the sites are also optimized to look good on mobile devices – a feature common to most Edicy sites unless deliberately built differently.

tallinnbicykleweek.ee / minuunistustepaev.ee – a revolution in the streets and evolutionary changes in mindset. Edicy has the honor of hosting sites of a number of NGOs who not only care about the people and physical environment around them but have transformed this knowledge into beautiful and functional websites. With the help of designers of course. Two of them, Tallinn Bicykle Week and "Day of my dreams" are combining photos and simple messages to interact with their viewer – a smart move since photos of actual people and events are powerful means of telling a story. Especially when speaking about web – long texts belong to books printed on paper.

filmmusic.ee / tab.ee / lightbiennale.ee – sites for different festivals and events, promoting Estonian composers, architectural heritage and the magical work of light designers. All of these sites originate from dudes at aku.co. These sites create a good showcase of what can be done with our catalogue tool – events, authors and publications can be filtered by name, event title or other characteristics to create a holistic overview for the visitor. The coding of these three sites has been done by Fraktal.co and Newtime.

We’ve just added a friendly little feature to Edicy which makes it very easy to send invites friends, colleagues and even distant relatives. If your friend clicks on your invite and signs up to one of our paid plans, they get a 50% discount and we give you 6 months of our premium service for free. The free months will be added to your account automatically.

If you don’t use our premium service yet, this lets you use your own domain, create more sub pages and use our other pro features.

You can call it just a promotion, or a way to thank our users that recommend Edicy to others. But it’s also a bit of a mission – this way we can make sure that more websites created in the coming months will be beautiful, easy to use and optimized for mobile. And who wouldn’t want that?

"I'd like to start selling stuff on my Edicy website. How can I?" -- a question I hear at least once a day. Good news is that there already are some online stores on Edicy. If your vision isn't too specific, it's fairly simple to build one too. Here's one of the most popular stores on Edicy — Mileedi, a flowers-by-mail service.

What's an online store?

An online store differs from an "ordinary" website by having little bit more technical complexity.

You need to have a way to

show the products

place an order

pay it up.

All of this is readily available for you in Edicy.

Larger, more established online businesses of course need more than that. There are some special components that are not available for such simple and convenient webstores — integrations with enterprise systems (inventory, CRM, logistics, book keeping) or user-specific options and purchase history.

Odds are though that you don't run a million dollar business looking for a new e-commerce platform. It's more likely you are someone like ourselves — running passionately a small business and getting started with your online success.

So let's see how you can do it with us.

1. Show me the products

The easiest way to show your products — if you only have a handful of them — is to create a normal content page for each of them under "Products" section. Add pictures, galleries and videos for visitors to get an overview. Write texts, include tables, add PDF-s with product overviews to specify the details. Link to reviews, add testimonials to build trust.

If you have a large number of different stuff on sale though, you ought to have more than that — new products should be listed first, best selling items need a place on the front page. Visitors should be able to group and filter them both by category or price or other characteristics. You need a product catalogue. There's an early beta version of such tool already available for a number of Edicy Plus users. So if you want to try it out just contact us and we help you set it up.

Another great option is to combine Edicy with Ecwid, a separate e-commerce tool that takes care for everything — provides you with a product catalogue and lets you manage prices, payment mechanisms and shopping carts.

2. Let me order it

Most often people only buy one item at a time. A pair of boots. A picture. A house. Sometimes you manage to sell more though. Two different pictures? A house AND a pair of boots? Could be.

Single-item-selling is rather easy to be set up with Edicy. Just set up a link for placing an order for every product separately.

Allowing user to order more than one product at a time is a bit more difficult — you'd have to provide visitors with a "shopping cart" for that. Visitor adds anythig to the cart first and then places the order for the whole pack. There's one great free component that you can either set up yourself or ask our support team to do it for you. It's called simpleCart — just go on and check out how conveniently it works.

If you decided to use Ecwid in the previous paragraph, you already have a shopping cart out of the box with them.

3. Let me pay for it

There are many options to choose from — a half-online method with money transfer in the end (works well with local businesses) or full online experience — paying with PayPal or credit card.

Credit card payments provided by PayPal — and Paypal wallet itself — work well with Edicy, you don't need any additional service. Just add a Paypal checkout link to each product or use simpleCart shopping cart in-between and done you are.

If you have more specific needs — for example direct payments through online banks are pretty popular around Europe — you can set up basically any payment mechanism with Ecwid.

Again — we are eager to help each and everyone of you get started with e-commerce just go on, contact us and we'll quickly help you out!

Your website is the number one place anyone will search for when hearing about your company. It's therefore crucial to have your website both constantly updated and done so also in a mobile friendly way as more than 20% of web browsing is done today via mobile devices.

Google rewards both frequent updates and mobile optimization with a better site ranking.

All websites on Edicy are mobile optimized, responsively adapting to any screen size your visitors use. But this is just one part of being friendly towards your visitors. The other part is readability — interesting and accurate writing.

Websites are rather scanned, not read even by desktop users. The attention span of an average visitor is very short and boredom kicks in easily. This 'disorder' is even worse with mobile users. Therefore you must make sure to produce great content.

Here are a few tips to make your content more interesting:

Combine texts with visuals — photos, graphs, videos.

Break long text blocks into shorter paragraphs, structure an arcticle into subsections with subheadings.

Which photos to use?

Photos and other visual materials placed to your site should reflect your company and what you do there – telling the story of your product or service and people behind it.

If possible, then instead of making photos on your own, do let professional photographer help you. You can also use iStockPhoto or other similar sources to illustrate your site. Keep in mind though — personal style and unique photos helps you to stand out from the crowd.

Performing content updates

As what I've written in my previous post then most buttons in Edicy edit mode are there to help you to build your site.

You can make smaller online changes without closing or hiding the subpage from your site menu. To do so, just go to "page properties" under page like icon on the right corner of your site, uncheck “publish changes automatically”; add content block with new information; delete the old one when ready and save changes you’ve made. That way you’ll be able to make minor changes online without putting down the whole page for the final users/visitors. When new data has been entered just delete unnecessary parts and push “save” button or check “publish changes automatically”.

Correct URL and built in SEO tools

While building a site or adding new sub pages It's wise to check also what is the final url – occasionally it might happen, that site content can be updated so, that old URL does not reflect the actual content anymore.

When you're on your blog page then same icon ables you to change the author of the article, publishing date and already mentioned URL. It happens quite often, that users don't pay attention to their blog url and their blog address end's up looking something like that: new_article_23

And as here already, then do fill in also your page description – giving a general overview of the content on this very sub page in couple of short sentences. Content entered here, will be shown in search results like that:

Oh, and when writing a blog post and thinking of sharing it via social media, then here are some tips to read. Plus it's possible to integrate your social media feeds to your site as we've done on this very page.

One of the most requested features, blog post tags are now available on every website in Edicy. With tags you can systematize your posts, group similar ones under one unifying marker — a tag.

For example, mark blog posts about your recent design discoveries with 'design' and 'inspiration' tags or use 'design' and 'people' tags if your post is about your favorite designers.

If you have a website with custom design, tags aren't automatically opened up for you as we have no authority to change your template. But with your permission, we can update your site in a blink of an eye. Just drop us a line at support@edicy.com.

Almost four years ago, we wrote a very popular post on how to make your website show up on Google. Not surprisingly, several users often ask us the opposite question too — how can I remove my site or part of it from
Google?

There are many reasons why one might want to remove her content from Google:

Some information has leaked to the search engine too
early — e.g. details about a new service or product.

The page itself is actually deleted, but the
information from it is still available (e.g. mistakenly published information);

Information has been updated on the website, but search
engine still displays the old version (e.g. old contacts or mistakenly
published information).

All in all, there are two preconditions for removing any data from
Google:

The page indexed by Google is deleted or its address (URL) is changed, and

The website on which the problematic page is (was) located is verified
with Google Webmaster Tools.

Removing your brand new website from Google

Building content of a new website takes considerable amount of time. You want to be certain that it will remain off the radars of search engines until you are ready to launch it. But with just a single misstep, info about the existence of your half baked website can easily leak to Google. It would result in Google indexing your unfinished site and making it public.

When creating a new website, such a "leak" might
appear when you share a link to your unfinished website in Facebook, e.g. sharing it with a group of friends. Also, such links might end up in Google when you share the link by e-mail or via Skype when it gets reshared to some third person and posted by him to any web-based channel which is monitored by Google.

Now track down the page or site address mistakenly seen by Google. You'll find it very easily — just click on the unwanted Google search result.

Next, got to your Google Webmaster Tools account and choose "Optimization" > "Remove URLs". In the next view,
choose "Create a new removal request" and enter the exact address of the page
you wish to removed. Google then asks you to choose the reason for
removal. Pick "Remove page from search results and cache". It can take up to a couple of days before your request is fulfilled by Google. You can follow the
status of your request from the very same place.

Same method can be used when an old page (e.g. page with an
out-dated information about your products) is removed from the website, but
search engines still show it in their results.

Leaked information on updating your site

Premature information might slip into Google’s sight also when you are just updating some part of your website. Say your site is already indexed by
Google. Now you are about to launch a new section. As a reasonable guy, you've hidden it from the menus. However, once you add just a single link to the new section in some older, indexed part of your site Google will jump in and index the new section prematurely too.

Again, you need to make sure that your content is not
publicly available. In addition to renaming and protecting the page with a
password, you should take one additional step. Remove premature content from
your page, publish it and before you re-enter the information, disable
automatic publishing.

Also, steps explained in the previous sections should be
taken as well. Find the problematic address and request the removal of it by
Google Webmaster Tools.

Cached content and search engines

But what if the search engine results already display correct information, but
the cached page they provide still has outdated
data — or even worse should be private? First, you
should invite Google to index your updated website (submit a sitemap to them).

Google provides you with an option to speed up the process
of updating the cached version of your website. For that, navigate to your
Google Webmaster Tools account and choose "Optimization" > "Remove URLs". In
the next view, choose "Create a new removal request" and enter the exact
address of the page you wish to be removed. This time, choose "Remove page from
cache only" to be the reason for removal.

How do I cancel the request of removal?

After Google has confirmed your request of removal, the site
or page removed won’t appear in search results at least for 90 days. However,
if the very same page or site is still accessible after those 90 days, then
Google might index it again. But in case you want your page to show up in
search engines before 90 days have passed by (e.g. you have finished adding
content to it), you can get it back to listing by removing the removal request in Webmaster Tools.

When you wish to see "correct" results. E.g. you wish to
see results only without "www" (mysite.com) and wish to remove those with "www" (www.mysite.com). This results into removing everything, including those
without "www".

Good to know

If your website uses several domains (e.g. mywebsite.com,
mybrand.eu etc), then it would be wise to check search results with all your
addresses and, if needed, repeat the removal process with other addresses as
well.

And don’t forget that there are other search engines besides
Google as well and removing a page from Google search results doesn’t remove
indexed information from others.

By far the most time- and brain-consuming part of website creation is writing the actual content in a well structured and interactively illustrated manner. It looks like a super tough job even to start with. And if someone finally does, he's in constant fear of blowing up his site — because all the tools are so damn difficult. But are they really?

I'm going to give you some quick tips to thoroughly lighten up your way through content creation. My advice is based on 1,5 years of day-to-day work assisting users from around the world in their website building efforts.

Site structure.

Each of Edicy's design templates sports a pre-made site structure with some sample content for main page, products and contacts. We've tried to keep it simple and logical, applicable to the majority of small companies.

You can easily add both new pages or even duplicate your site structure into new languages.

Content blocks.

Each page in your site structure consists of some parts that you can edit and some that are pre-determined by design. Editable parts are called content blocks, which can be either a text area, a gallery or a form. You can combine them depending on what information you want to provide to the visitors of that particular page. Get more useful content editing tips from our FAQ page.

When adding text or photos to your site it would be useful to have more than one content block per page – this way you can reorder their locations very easily once such necessity arises.

Managing photos.

You can show pics on your site either by dragging them into any rich text area or by creating a separate gallery content block.

All the photos on your site can be edited right inside the browser after you've dragged them into a rich text area. You can crop, resize and rotate them. Large photos can be optimized for web right after you've inserted them into text area.

Please keep in mind that once you've changed a photo in one place, it will be changed in all of its locations. If you need different behavior, just upload the same pic for each different location.

To distinguish between the photo versions it would be wise to also name the file accordingly. For example john_doe_thumbnail.jpg and john_doe_large.jpg etc. To see all your photos in a single list, go to yourname.com/photos while logged in.

Setting up galleries.

Use galleries if you want to show more than one picture in a row. Pics placed into a gallery can't be edited the way you can edit pics inside text areas. Photos will appear in their original size and you can't crop or rotate them. It's therefore wise to edit your gallery pics in your computer before uploading them to Edicy. It's just easier to work with them that way. You'll find some useful programsfor that around the internet.

Saving your edits.

Edicy saves all your edits automatically every few seconds. If you are faster than that, you can also save manually by hitting Ctrl+S or clicking the 'Save' button down below on the right-hand side of the main menu bar.

Updating your browser.

Please don't forget to update your browser every now and then as this will ease up your life a lot. Old browsers are less secure, slower and they are less capable tools for using any webservices like Edicy. It's rather easy to upgrade and the whole internet is going to look and feel better.

Have you ever worried that one of your sub contractors working on your site will accidentally change subscription or site design without your approval? Well, worry no more. We've just introduced editor and site owner roles in Edicy.

Editors can do only things that Edicy is intended to do — edit site content and nothing more. They do not have an option to manage subscriptions or domains. This means that they also won't receive renewal notifications from us — which, in turn, is gentle on their inboxes.

From now on, every person added to your site will be in editor role by default. To change one's role, just click on "Edit" link next to the person's card in the people screen and click on "Make account owner" link on the right-hand side of person's edit screen.

Today, we made it possible to add titles to the photos in galleries. Along with this oft-requested change we rolled out several improvements to picture and file management.

Adding or editing photo titles follows the same approach as everything else in Edicy — you can edit everything on spot, right where your site visitors will see it. To add (or change) title under a photo, just click on it in the gallery. You'll see the photo in large size along with a placeholder saying "Title goes here". Type title in, save it and you are done. Site visitors will now see the new title when viewing the pic in full size.

You might also notice that file panel is much faster than before. We've rebuilt most of it internally to increase speed, stability and ease of use. We've ditched the old clumsy file filter that did not work well when you had lot of files. It is replaced with simple search box that lets you find any of your files in Edicy by name.